Ambition, scope of SAISD plan raises eyebrows

1of 4Chula Boyle, a retired educator, poses some questions as SAISD Superintendent Pedro Martinez lays out his five year plan to parents and community members during a town hall meeting in the Highlands High School cafeteria on September 10, 2015.Photo: Tom Reel / San Antonio Express-News

2of 4The audience considers discussion points as SAISD Superintendent Pedro Martinez lays out his five year plan to parents and community members during a town hall meeting in the Highlands High School cafeteria on September 10, 2015.Photo: Tom Reel / San Antonio Express-News

3of 4SAISD Superintendent Pedro Martinez lays out his five year plan to parents and community members last month. . Raising test scores is a worthy goal, a reader says, but the district should increase a sense of respect and accountability as well.Photo: Tom Reel /San Antonio Express-News

4of 4SAISD Superintendent Pedro Martinez lays out his five year plan to parents and community members during a town hall meeting in the Highlands High School cafeteria on September 10, 2015.Photo: Tom Reel / San Antonio Express-News

After presenting his five-year plan to two high school communities last week, Pedro Martinez, superintendent of the San Antonio Independent School District, heard many variations on a single question.

How?

Martinez unrolled his “redefining excellence” proposal Wednesday and Thursday in back-to-back community meetings at Jefferson and Highlands high schools. Meetings will follow at five others.

“We’re not going to be a national model school district if everybody’s not part of that success,” he said.

Martinez wants 70 percent of SAISD schools, across all neighborhoods, to achieve an “A” or “B” letter grade by 2020, under a rating system the state will introduce in 2017. He wants half the district’s eligible students to participate in Advanced Placement and International Baccalaureate courses, up from 25 percent — and wants 59 percent of AP and IB test-takers to pass, compared with 13 percent now.

In five years, Martinez wants to match the national average rate of students who score at “college ready” levels on the SAT and ACT exams. The national average now is 43 percent and the state average is 25 percent. In SAISD, the number is 5 percent.

Also by 2020, Martinez wants to see 80 percent of SAISD graduates go to college, including 50 percent to four-year institutions and 10 percent to the top 200, or “Tier One,” schools. In SAISD now, 52 percent of graduates attend college, with 25 percent going to four-year institutions and 2 percent going to Tier One schools.

Under Martinez’s plan, 90 percent of students will be on a path for career and technology, AP, IB or dual credit in high school. That involves an overhaul of gifted programs districtwide, Martinez said. Next school year will bring more dual-language academies and science, technology, engineering and math, or STEM programs, he said.

“We underserve our children that are at level and our children that are advanced,” Martinez told a crowd exceeding 100 in the Jefferson meeting. “It’s so clear in the data.”

At both meetings, parents and educators alike praised Martinez’s ideas but asked how the district would achieve such big gains in such a short time.

“These are the kids that have come up in the system,” said Chula Boyle, a former assistant superintendent for curriculum and instruction who retired in 2003, at the Highlands meeting. “They are in the seventh grade right now. I’m pretty aware of your data. That is a huge, huge task, so what are the kinds of things that you have in mind?”

Martinez said students who are at or above grade level can perform still better when rigor is increased, especially with after-school tutoring and extracurricular activities he is proposing for advanced as well as struggling students.

At the end of the meetings, Martinez posed two questions: Are these goals aggressive enough? Will they lead SAISD to become a district parents choose for their kids?

April Reyna, who has three children in SAISD schools and one in a charter school, told Martinez at the Jefferson meeting that the current SAISD curriculum for the children she has in gifted programs is the same as for those who are not.

“I know this is his first year on, so I’m willing to travel with him and see where it goes,” Reyna said after the meeting. “If a year goes by and I don’t notice any change, I will be addressing these same issues all over again.”

Alia Malik is an education reporter for the San Antonio Express-News. She covers several local school districts, community colleges and education trends. Before joining the Express-News in 2013, she worked for a daily newspaper in Connecticut, where she covered the city of Naugatuck and some of the fallout from the Sandy Hook Elementary School shooting.

The daughter of a New Englander and a Bangladeshi immigrant, Alia grew up in Prince George’s County, Maryland, and graduated from the Philip Merrill College of Journalism at the University of Maryland. A former Peace Corps volunteer in El Salvador, she speaks and writes fluently in Spanish.